by Joe Canzano
“Hey, Suzy. Are you feeling better?”
“Hi, Ricardo. I’m feeling unarmed. Also, what was the alarm about? If you were trying to wake me up, nice job.”
“Oh, sorry. It was all about the failed engine. Your gun is over there,” he said, pointing to a nearby shelf.
She grabbed the weapon and checked it over. It was still loaded and seemed to be okay.
“Are you going to shoot me now?” Ricardo said.
“No. Not yet.”
“Good. I was hoping you’d wait.”
“Until when?”
He grinned. “Until you know I’m not a bad guy—and that I like you. I really do.”
“That’s nice. I was just talking to your sister. I think she likes you, too.”
“She does. But she wasn’t someone I was planning to bring on a romantic adventure.”
“Oh, really? And were you planning to bring me?”
“I’m not good at planning,” he said with another grin. “I guess I’m planning to see what happens while I don’t make any plans.”
“Story of my life.”
He stood up and moved closer to her.
“Is it? What’s your real story, Suzy Spitfire? Are you going to tell me? You had a sister... It was all about her, wasn’t it?”
Suzy froze. She didn’t want to talk about Trish right now—or at least not much.
“Yeah,” Suzy said. “I had a sister.”
He paused, seemingly waiting for more words, but she had none.
“And?” he finally said.
“And my Uncle Leonardo raped her,” Suzy said, turning away. She paused and took a deep breath. “Trish was nine years old, and it happened lots of times… And she never told anyone, not then. But when she was fifteen, she told my parents—and me.”
“Wow. And then what happened?”
“Nothing happened because they didn’t do anything.”
Suzy turned back around and stared at him. “Sure, they were angry with Leonardo—furious, I guess, in their own wimpy way. They confronted him, and they stopped talking to him, but he gave them a bunch of sweet talk and bullshit about how it was all a 'misunderstanding,' and he was sorry it had been 'misinterpreted,' and it never really happened the way Trish said—and they didn’t go to the cops. They said there was no evidence, so it would be hard to prove; they thought it would put Trish through all kinds of trauma to remember the details—to testify, to dig things up. So they decided to turn it into a big secret. They seemed to think they were protecting her by trying to pretend it never happened at all. I screamed and yelled about reporting it, but my parents more or less told Trish to ‘get over it.’ They didn’t say that—but that’s what they did, and that’s how it seemed, at least to me, and to her. And then she killed herself.”
Suzy stopped talking again. Her chest was heaving as she blinked back her tears.
“How could I have never noticed at the time?” she said. “Why didn’t I see that something was wrong with her? But I was too busy partying and running around and learning how to fly a spaceship. I didn’t see the signs, and I didn’t understand her depression, and I will never forgive myself.”
Now the tears streamed down her face. Ricardo put his arms around her and hugged her.
“It wasn’t your fault, Suzy. There are lots of monsters out there. Sometimes they’re hard to see.”
“Yeah, well, there’s one less monster out there now,” Suzy said while wiping her eyes. Then her voice got hard. “I killed Leonardo. I blew the fucker’s balls off. I stood there and cursed at him while he bled to death—and I felt sad that I couldn’t kill him another thousand times. Then my grandmother gave me her spaceship and I took off. About two years later I heard my father was dead. I didn’t go to the funeral. And I don’t trust anyone.”
For a minute, neither of them spoke. She fingered the chain around her neck, and the ring that hung from it. Then Ricardo pulled back from her a bit with his hands still on her shoulders. He looked into her face.
“I’d like you to trust me, Suzy,” he said.
She said nothing. But she felt her heart beating faster.
“I’d like you to like me,” he said.
She was still quiet.
Then he smiled and whispered, “I’d like to make you happy. I’d like to make you feel like your soul is swimming in a thousand specks of starlight.”
She couldn’t help but laugh now. “I can do that without you, Ricardo. The whole universe is right outside the window.”
“I know. I was trying to be poetic… Maybe I should just kiss you instead.”
“Maybe you should.”
He kissed her, and it was good. It was a long, hot kiss that went on and on. She felt the blood pounding in her ears. It felt nice, too—like reality was melting away. Finally, they tore themselves apart.
“That was nice,” Suzy said in a breathless kind of way.
“Do you want me to do it again?”
She didn’t answer. Instead, she lunged forward and clamped her lips back onto his. She felt his arms squeezing her hard as her body pressed against him. He kissed her back with even more gusto, and it was like he was trying to suck the heart right out of her chest.
“Let’s go in the lounge,” he said.
“Yeah, let’s do that.”
The cockpit had an epic view, but the chairs were too small, the floor was too hard, and nobody needed to have a random, wrong button pressed by a couple of undulating fools.
***
Suzy opened her eyes. She was naked, lying on her side, with her arm across Ricardo’s chest. Her head felt light and airy, like she was sleeping on a cloud, and she guessed it had something to do with all the wild sex—or was it something else?
She jerked herself upright and looked around. Slowly her brain started to put back the pieces of what had happened. They’d started out kissing in the cockpit before crashing into the lounge and then finally bonking their way down the hall to Ricardo’s cabin. And come to think of it, the sex had not been all that wild, at least not in a physical way. There’d been no pumping on a pool table, or upside down doggy-style in a zero gravity decompression chamber. The positions had been basic—and that was perfect, because in her experience there were really only a few positions that were actually functional.
But it had been great, and she felt much better than sex usually made her feel. Why?
She jumped out of the bed and scanned the room fast. Against one wall was a built-in desk with a monitor screen and an intercom. That’s good, she thought. Maybe I can call room service and order myself a new life. She saw boots and pants and shirts scattered around like wreckage from an aerial disaster, but none of them were hers. She spotted her dragonfly earrings on a night table and scooped them up. Around her neck, she still had the silver chain with the ring through it.
She bolted from the cabin and raced toward the lounge. She was jittery, and this was a bad sign. After all, this was hardly the first time she’d had to collect the wreckage of her wardrobe on a spaceship. Damn!
She turned a corner so fast that she crashed right into Maria.
“Ugh! I’m sorry, Maria—uh, hi.”
“Hello, Suzy,” Maria said with a tight smile. “Are you looking for your clothes?”
“Why do think that?” Suzy blurted.
“Because you have nothing on.”
“Oh.” Suzy looked down. Right.
Suzy gave a quick smile. “I am wearing some jewelry,” she said. Then she walked fast past Maria and ran into the lounge where she discovered her bra. Most of her remaining clothes were in the cockpit.
She yanked them on and took a deep breath before sitting in the pilot’s chair to contemplate.
Suzy had a secret. For all of her loud-talking, hard-partying, fierce-fighting ways, she wasn’t that sexually experienced. She wasn’t comfortable having sex with people she barely knew—and she’d never known any of her partners much, other than Aiko, and that had been one brief stab at a roman
ce she’d been too immature to handle. Or maybe just too scared.
Sure, she’d been around a bit, but the bits had been scattered among a handful of meaningless encounters. And she hadn’t enjoyed them. She’d known lots of people who could give themselves physically and not emotionally, but that didn’t work for her—and since she sure didn’t want to give herself emotionally, the physical aspect had suffered. Actually, it hadn’t suffered because she’d always taken care of that stuff herself, and she’d never broken her own heart and she’d never gotten herself pregnant. There was a certain level of trust she needed in order to let a guy near her naked body, and she knew it was nothing a tough girl like her should be ashamed of—but she did feel awkward about it. Still, she had no plans to change.
She’d had no intention of letting Ricardo pick her up in that bar. That had never been in danger of happening, no matter how hot he’d looked and how rowdy she’d seemed. Call her a fraud or a tease or whatever; it just wasn’t her style. If someone else wanted to do it, fine—it was a matter of preference. But she just wasn’t wired that way.
She would be happy to run away and hide from Ricardo. She didn’t want to see him.
But who was walking through the lounge? Her heart leaped with expectation. She hoped it was him.
It was! He entered the cockpit and gave her a full blast of his smile.
“Hey, Suzy,” he said. “You look great—but you left me. I was going to make you breakfast.”
She took a breath and got herself under control.
“Does the kitchen close early around here?” she said. “Breakfast sounds fine.”
“Yeah, that’s true,” he said, and then he frowned. “But we better eat it quick. Someone is after us again.”
Suzy looked at one of the greenish glowing screens and saw a ship closing on them fast. It looked like a frigate. She studied a readout that identified unknown ships and saw it was coming up blank.
“Who do you think it is?” she said.
“I don’t know. But if I had to guess, I’d say it’s a pirate ship.”
Chapter 13
Pablo Juarez still called his country Mexico, even though the official name was “The United Mexican Union of Earth.” Everyone called it Mexico. A hundred years hadn’t changed that—not out here, where the paper-shuffling government jackasses would never come.
On this sunny morning, he stood on his patio and stared at the jagged reddish mountains in the distance. Then he slammed a fresh clip into his pistol. He took aim at the man-shaped target 50 meters away. He fired and missed. He swore and fired again, and he missed again. And then again.
A round woman with a bun of black hair on her head came out of the house. “Pablo, you’ll never hit that thing,” she said. “It’s too far away. Why don’t you move it closer—move it to the end of the patio.” Then she pointed to a spot close to where Pablo was standing.
Pablo shook his head. “Leave me alone, Mamma. I‘m having fun.”
“Fun? You’re killing half the animals in the desert.”
“Not half. I’m sure I’ve killed less than that.”
“Well, you haven’t killed anything you’ve been aiming at.”
“Are you trying to hurt my confidence?”
“No. I’m trying to tell you to get another hobby. Or maybe get married.”
Pablo swore to himself. She was at it again. “Who am I going to marry?” he said, throwing up his arms. “My bride is in outer space.”
“Your bride? Ricardo’s sister, Maria?”
“Of course. Why do you sound so surprised?”
“Because she keeps telling you ‘no,’ and you keep not listening. She’s a good girl, but maybe she’s not the one for you. So find another one.”
Pablo gritted his teeth and fired five more shots. All misses. His mother shook her head and went back into the house.
A man at a nearby table laughed and sipped his beer. “The great Pablo Juarez is getting harassed by his mother.”
Pablo frowned and put the pistol down on the table. He sat in a chair across from the man. Time to get down to business.
“Tell me about potential buyers for the super AI,” he said.
The man smiled. “The Cloud City Consolidation of Venus is interested; I got a message from a top person there. Mars is interested, too—and so are at least ten city-states. They’ll all pay at least a hundred million earthos for it.”
Pablo grinned and shook his head. “Oscar, do you know how much business we need to do to make that kind of money?”
“A lot.”
“You bet. Let me ask you, wouldn’t you want to marry a man with that kind of money?”
Oscar smiled again and sipped his drink. “No. I don’t want to marry a man, Pablo. But there are a million girls who would marry you for less. A lot less.”
“But I only want this one girl.”
“One is a small number,” Oscar said. “Maybe you should expand your possibilities.” Then he grimaced. “The Feds killed Carlos and that’s bad. He moved a lot of stuff for us, so how did that get fucked up? Was it Ricardo’s fault? If he wasn’t Maria’s brother you’d cut his balls off.”
Pablo raised his eyebrows. “Ricardo? Never! But I’ll call him again and see how it’s going. He took my ship and ran off with a wild woman of his own—a girl named ‘Suzy Spitfire.’ And now she might be the only one who knows where the brain is.”
“Are we just going to sit here and wait for lover boy to do something right for once? That’s a bad plan.”
Pablo got up and snapped another clip into his pistol. “Ricardo’s smarter than you think, and he has a good plan. He’s finally going to put his natural talents to good use—and by ‘natural talents’ I mean his dick. He’s going to get that girl to tell him where the brain is. I have faith in him.”
He grimaced and fired three quick shots at the distant target. This time they were all hits.
Chapter 14
Suzy slid into the copilot seat and studied the ominous readouts. The other ship was definitely stalking them, sliding along through the void like a silvery shark.
“So what’s our plan?” she said.
“I suppose we can fight.”
“I like it. Great plan.”
“Or we could be smart and avoid getting blown to bits.”
“What? I thought you said this thing was armed.”
“It is. But with one engine down we don’t have the acceleration. Also, our energy guns will have reduced power. And that ship has plenty of speed and lots of weapons.”
“Yeah, but do they have any balls, Ricardo?”
“When you’ve got the power and the punch, you don’t need balls.”
“Are you trying to be poetic?”
“No,” he said with a grin. “It just comes naturally.”
She gave a snort. “What comes naturally to me is a good fight. And that’s what we’re going to do.”
“I’m not going to let you get us killed, Suzy.”
“What a coincidence. I’m not going to let us get killed, either.”
She gave a short laugh as her fingers flew over the controls.
Ricardo’s eyes popped open wide. “What are you doing?”
“We did this your way once,” Suzy said. “And look where it got us.”
“What the hell are you talking about? You mean when we outran those ships from Tycho City? That got us here alive—unlike your plan that would’ve gotten us killed.”
Suzy wasn’t listening. Was Ricardo saying something? It sounded logical enough—it sounded like something her dad would say. But right now she was busy powering up the AGM missiles.
The ship was swinging around. Ricardo grabbed her hands and she yanked them away. He tried to push some buttons and she shoved his hands aside. Now they both grabbed the thruster control and started yanking and pulling back and forth. And then a voice boomed through the cockpit.
It was a message from the other ship, and they both stopped yanking. The language
was English, with an accent that indicated the London area of the Earth state Euro.
“Hello, space travelers,” the voice said. “This is Captain Orange on the pirate ship Heartbreaker. Drop your deflectors, and drop your knickers… Power down your guns and your missiles. You’ll be boarded in five minutes so prepare to receive me.”
“What?” Ricardo said. “Did you hear that? Somebody over there thinks we’re going to roll out a red carpet for him.”
“Yeah,” Suzy said. “And somebody also thinks I’m wearing knickers.”
She hadn’t been able to find her damned knickers/panties. Hopefully, it wasn’t too cold on Choccoban.
Ricardo glanced at her sideways and hit the radio switch. Then he gave her a sly smile and pointed to a nearby fire extinguisher that was partially covered by a pair of black female undergarments. Suzy smiled back and vaguely remembered tossing them in that direction.
While she pulled her clothes on, Ricardo responded to the message. “This is the captain of the Correcaminos Rojo. We’re not looking for any trouble, but we can defend ourselves. So leave us alone.” Then he turned to Suzy and said, “The Red Roadrunner. That’s the name of the ship.”
Suzy said nothing—even though she’d understood perfectly. Why hadn’t she told Ricardo she was fluent in Spanish? It seemed like something a girl would tell a guy who also spoke the lingo.
“Nice,” she said. “But I’ve got no idea what color a roadrunner is supposed to be. I also didn’t think you’d surrender to every swashbuckling ass-pipe who came yo-ho-ho-ing our way.”
She once again grabbed the thruster control. Ricardo swore and grabbed it back.
“Suzy, we’re not going to surrender! We’re just not going to fight them on their terms.”
“So exactly how are we going to do it?”
He hesitated. He seemed to be studying her.
I must look like a wreck, she thought. I look like some trashy space-chick who just slept under a greasy guy’s rocket.
“You look so pretty,” Ricardo said. “Here’s what we’re going to do.”
The ship shuddered as he launched a pair of missiles.
